You Don’t Miss Your Water Till Your Well Runs Dry

Pete Takeda, is a climber, author, and mountain athlete and has been using Nutriex Sport for over 20 years to recover, perform, and continues pushing limits in his 60s.

There’s a particular kind of climber who doesn’t quit. Not because they haven’t been tested by surgeries, decades of hard use, the kind of injuries that sideline most people for good, but because the mountain is simply where they belong. Pete Takeda is that climber.

With over 30 years of elite-level climbing including bouldering, big walls, alpine, and ice - Pete is a versatile and enduring athlete as he ages into his 60s. He spent six seasons in Yosemite earning the nickname “Big Wall Pete,” led expeditions to the Himalayas, competed, and still managed to build a parallel career as an award-winning author, Senior Contributing Editor for several climbing publications, and Editor of Accidents in North America Climbing. He’s based in Boulder, Colorado, although lately, he’ll tell you, Salt Lake has been pulling him in.

He’s also been taking Nutriex Sport for more than 20 years. And he’ll be the first to tell you exactly what happens when he runs out.

A Body Pushed to Its Limits

Pete’s had a relationship with injury starting in the early 1990s during the birth of sport climbing - an era with no real roadmap for training. “We were climbing some of the more difficult routes of the era,” he recalls. “In order to get that far, you had to train hard. And there was no real well-developed and time-tested knowledge on training.” During a regional competition in the Bay Area, Pete experienced a pulley tear which was his first serious warning.

Over the decades, the cumulative toll added up: shoulder surgery, knee surgery, and in 2011, the severance of two finger tendons in his right hand. For the next 13 years, he couldn’t use that hand to its full potential. Most athletes would have accepted that as the end of meaningful climbing.

Pete didn’t. Four years ago, he embarked on an intensive rehabilitation program including massage, fingerboarding, and Chinese medicine, all under the guidance of practitioner Scott Turpin. “In some ways, he saved my climbing life,” Pete says. “Which by default is like saving my life.”

The Constant Through All of It

Throughout surgeries, recovery, and a career that has spanned multiple climbing disciplines and continents, one thing has remained consistent: Nutriex Sport. Pete began taking it roughly eight years after his first finger injury and hasn’t stopped.

“Nutriex Sport is this foundational thing you take to prevent injuries,” he explains. “But you really notice the effects when you’re recovering from any myofascial or tendon injury. It’s the one constant.”

He noticed it most clearly last January when he ran low on supply and started rationing. Within days: a cold settling in, dry eyes, inflammation from the Texas dust. The moment his shipment arrived, he doubled down. The lesson landed plainly.

“You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry,” Pete says. “Nutriex is as essential as water for athletes who depend on their tendon strength and connective tissue.”

Performance Without a Ceiling

Here’s what makes Pete’s story genuinely remarkable: he isn’t just maintaining. He’s improving. Last year in HuecoTanks, Texas, he completed a particular V8 boulder problem, which he had tried and couldn’t do the moves on, when he first visited in the early 2000s. Just a reminder, he is now in his early 60s.

“I think I’m going to do the hardest rock climbs I’ve ever done in the next five to ten years,” he says, without a hint of irony. “Without a doubt.”

For Pete, the secret to athletic longevity isn’t slowing down but understanding your body well enough to keep going smarter. Modern training culture, he notes, has shifted dramatically. “Training is built with longevity in mind such as knowing when to stop, knowing when to listen to your body.” Combine that with the right nutritional foundation, and the ceiling, he believes, keeps rising.

He recently introduced a colleague, a PhD researcher in her mid 40s rediscovering climbing, to Nutriex after she started worrying about finger soreness. Her response: “What is this stuff?” His answer was simple: “All I can say is, if you stop taking it, you’ll see exactly what your world turns into.”

Riding It Out Until the End

When someone asks Pete how long he plans to keep climbing, he doesn’t pause. “Hopefully until I’m dead,” he says. “I will try to do it till I die.”

That kind of commitment requires infrastructure including physical, nutritional, and mental. For Pete, Nutriex Sport is part of that infrastructure. Not a shortcut. Not a silver bullet. A foundational constant that supports the connective tissue, joint health, and recovery capacity that decades of climbing demand.

“Nutriex has really kept me bobbing along,” Pete says. “The thing I notice most is longevity - the ability to just keep at it. That’s where something like Nutriex Sport shines.”

Twenty-plus years of field testing. Twelve Himalayan expeditions. Three surgeries. One V8 in his early 60s that he couldn’t do in his 30s. If that’s not a case study, we don’t know what is.